Maybe you’ve seen the Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim trailer by now. Maybe you haven’t. If you haven’t taken the three minutes it takes, I’ve embedded it here for you. The trailer inspired this post, so it’s best you see it first.

Okay, with that out of the way, I want to talk about game immersion and use that to make an argument for vocal interaction with video games. I want you to see the Skyrim trailer first, because I plan to use that game as a touchstone for this post.
Even if …

The third part of Josh Forman’s 3 part series on gamasutra about storytelling techniques inspired this post, although it’s not required reading. Still, it might help to read his ideas about medium before reading this. Here’s a link.
Anyway, to point:
Games are built on abstractions, both from the design standpoint and the player standpoint. There’s no point in “real life” where pressing X makes a person perform a jump, or a kick, or whatever. It’s an abstraction. Game designers provide a world where players connect the relationship between pressing X and …

I’ve been trying to write a post about video game User Interfaces for over a year. But every time I sat down to really start writing it, nothing substantial ever came out, even though I knew there was a very important idea in there somewhere.
I’ve played hundreds of games over the years I’ve been a gamer. And every time I play a game for the first time, I like to examine the user interface. User interfaces are interesting because they are understood not to be the game itself, but rather, …